This year’s 11th Annual State of Agile Report by VersionOne, is a good read, with many worthwhile insights into the adoption and progression of Agile and DevOps in engineering departments.

Strong Growth in DevOps Adoption

Interesting to see DevOps mentioned for the first time in the Report. According to respondents, 71% currently have a DevOps initiative in their organization or are planning one in the next 12 months. Last years’ report had no mention of DevOps, so it’s striking—and encouraging—to see such a significant rise in activity in a single year.

Our experience at Daitan Group is very much in alignment with the Report’s findings. Among our clients, many are using DevOps tools and processes; and have active projects underway. Given the prevalence of active interest from clients, we published, “DevOps and the Engineering Led World of the Enterprise” to provide information around four common topics:

Enterprise Adoption of DevOps

The Five Core Principles of DevOps

Getting Started with DevOps

DevOps in Practice: Lessons Learned at Daitan Group

The Keys to Agile’s Successful Adoption and Scalability

VersionOne states that their survey runs for six months and captures thousands of respondents of which, 94% practice Agile. And of that group, nearly one third have been practicing Agile for 5 years or more. So it makes sense that 44% consider themselves “extremely knowledgeable,” and 28% are “very knowledgeable.” Combined, that’s nearly three quarters of the respondents and with that level of maturity across such a large pool, it begs the question—what does it take for these organizations to successfully scale their Agile practices across all their development efforts and teams? VersionOne asked about the keys to success and year-over-year came up with the same 5 points: “Executive sponsorship (48%), consistent process and practices (41%), implementation of a common tool across teams (36%), and agile consultants or trainers (36%) continue to be cited in the top five tips for successfully scaling agile.”

In engineering and product development, the goal is always the same—to increase speed and quality, and ultimately achieve continuous integration and delivery.

At Daitan Group, we are frequently called upon to migrate existing product development efforts to a more Agile process, and to ‘model’ best practices for Agile software development. With experience and expertise comes knowledge, and over the past few years, we have learned some important best practices about Agile, which we published in 2016 as a white paper titled “Software Continuous Integration & Delivery”. Interestingly enough, it is very much aligned with how VersionOne’s respondents view their keys to success.

What Drives Organizations to Adopt Agile (and DevOps) Practices?

Although respondents provided a variety of reasons, the primary purpose for adopting Agile was accelerating product delivery. This imperative to accelerate time-to-market increased to 69% over last year’s results, and was closely followed by, the ability to manage ‘change’ and increase productivity. Our experience with clients is virtually the same, the business imperative to accelerate product delivery is most often the driving force because in today’s highly competitive environment, technology executives are expected to increase innovation cycles.

Overall, we believe Agile and DevOps go hand-in-hand toward enabling rapid innovation cycles and regardless of where you are on the adoption curve, the effort is worthwhile and will yield the right development and business benefits. After all, in engineering/product development, the goal is always the same—to increase speed and quality, and ultimately achieve continuous integration and delivery.

About the Survey

The 11th annual State of Agile survey was conducted between July and December, 2016. Sponsored by VersionOne (www.versionone.com), the survey invited individuals from a broad range of industries in the global software development community and was promoted far beyond VersionOne’s customer base at tradeshows and multiple digital channels. Thousands of responses were collected, analyzed, and prepared into a summary report by Analysis.Net Research, an independent survey consultancy. Only 20% of the respondents were VersionOne customers, indicating the range and diversity of respondents.